Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up
his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried
out, "I love a challenge!" Another, sweating away on these
puzzles, looked up with a pleased expression and said with
authority, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative!"

What is wrong with them? I wondered. I always
thought you coped with failure or you didn't cope with failure. I
never thought anyone loved failure. Were these
alien children or were they on to something?

You could see it in these kids' faces: When they came to a
problem they didn't get, they didn't start thinking they were
failing, Dweck says.

They thought they were learning.

While it seems like a small thing for a small child, the
long-term difference is staggering, for the way you relate to a
challenge reveals your mindset, Dweck says, or the view you have
of yourself.

Dweck's decades of research show that your mindset
predicts your achievement. Her work has gained her fame in the
dev psych game. Everybody trying to figure out how to the best
way to get better — from English football clubs to the Khan Academy — comes to her to get educated
on mindsets.

A "fixed mindset" assumes that our character,
intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we
can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the
affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how
those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard;
striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a
way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.

A "growth mindset," on the other hand, thrives
on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of un-intelligence
but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our
existing abilities.

These mindsets, Dweck's three decades of research suggest, are at
the root of whether some people become the best in their field
while others languish.

At the core is a distinction in the way you think your will
affects your ability: If you think that your talents can be
developed with hard work, you'll be more likely to push them
forward,
an attitude Finns call "sisu." If you think talent is
innate, then you won't hustle quite so hard.

Dweck got into the field of research back when she was a PhD
student at Yale in the '60s and '70s. "Learned helplessness" was all the rage back
then; researchers found that lab animals would give up before
trying something because they had failed before.

Dweck wondered if kids did the same thing.

“I asked, ‘What makes a really capable child give up in the face
of failure, where other children may be motivated by the
failure?’” she recalls.

Dweck and her assistants ran an experiment on elementary school
children whom school personnel had identified as helpless. These
kids fit the definition perfectly: If they came across a few math
problems they couldn't solve, for example, they no longer could
do problems they had solved before — and some didn’t recover that
ability for days.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the
students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and
encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist
in the face of failure — and to succeed. The control group showed
no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to
recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, "really supported the
idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the
helpless and mastery-oriented patterns." Her 1975 article on the
topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary
psychology.

Further studies confirmed this.

In one study of four-year-olds, Dweck let them choose between
solving easy or difficult jigsaw puzzles. As you might guess by
now, the
kids with a fixed mindset chose the easier one, since it would
validate their god-given abilities. The growth-oriented kids
opted for the harder puzzle, since they saw it as an opportunity
to learn. Like Popovanotes, the "fixed" kids wanted
to do the easy puzzle since it would help them look smart and
thus successful; the "growth" kids wanted the hard puzzles since
their sense of success was tied up in becoming
smarter.

The takeaway: The growth mentality leads people to more deeply
engage with the limits of their skills — which is a better
predictor of success than
any 10,000 Rule.